What it means to see

Sheila Nirenberg

Weill Cornell Medical College

In college, Sheila Nirenberg began studying English as a way to understand human nature. When that didn’t sate her curiosity, she tried psychology. Still frustrated and determined to answer basic questions about what it means to be human, she turned to science. She is now an associate professor at the Institute for Computational Biomedicine.

As a neuroscientist, Dr. Nirenberg is addressing one of those fundamentals—what it means to see. She is developing a technology that could help restore sight to people with diseases that have damaged the retina, such as retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. An estimated 30 million people worldwide have such conditions.

The technology comes out of her investigation into how the retina transforms light patterns into signals for the brain. In sighted people, photoreceptor cells forward data about detected light to output, or ganglion, cells. Those cells translate that data into electrical impulses, which they send on to the brain. The brain, in turn, translates those signals into an image—a face, a book, the sky.

When a retina is damaged, however, the essential information never reaches the brain.

Dr. Nirenberg’s accomplishment has been to decipher the retinal code and deduce the equivalence between light patterns and the electrical impulses sent to the brain. Using gene therapy, she was able to stimulate ganglion cells in blind mice to make them light-responsive and send signals to the brain. She determined that those signals bore a recognizable resemblance to a baby, an animal and views of Central Park.

The technology Dr. Nirenberg is developing: eyeglasses, with a minute camera, an image-encoding chip and tiny lights that communicate with ganglion cells. Such glasses would be a major advance over artificial retinas in use today, which can cost as much as $100,000, must be surgically implanted and do little more than allow a blind person to see the edges of objects.

Dr. Nirenberg is a 2011 winner of the New York City Investment Fund Bioaccelerate NYC award, a competition for biomedical research that shows significant commercial potential. She is being pursued by companies interested in her work, but for now she is staying in the lab and perfecting her glasses. She is intends to test the product on monkeys next year and in humans after that. And she also believes that the principles she’s uncovered will have wider applications in neuroscience.

“It opens the door to studying the brain in a different way,” said Dr. Nirenberg. “In the same way we are sending signals to a blind patient’s brain, bypassing damaged tissue, we can start to get insights into other, parallel channels.”

—Judith Messina

About this Gallery

Whether in an operating room or a research laboratory, writing algorithms or charting cell transmissions, these neuroscientists are on the cutting edge.